⁴⁵ in the Parish of Te Mania from Te Puru, who had also been one of the parties who had recently alienated the majority of Ngati Tokotoko’s land at Omokoroa, also to Gill. The purchase was 100 acres for £25 or two shillings an acre. Turner and Gill were witnesses for each other’s purchases.³⁹

Deed Registers held at Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), Auckland, are obviously an important source for constructing a chronology of the alienations and identifying the individuals who participated in the transactions that have been discussed. These records, for example, inform us that, in the case of the Katikati Te Puna reserves, Abraham Warbrick was the interpreter who was most often employed. Warbrick was involved in nine transactions, although William Mair also interpreted a number of transactions as well. Many of the witnesses were also purchasers themselves. As the transactions were not required by law to be scrutinised by an independent officer, concerns might be raised as to whether this situation exposed the reserves to unscrupulous buyers.

The Auckland solicitor William Henry Kissling was by far the most prominent solicitor in the Katikati-Te Puna alienations, unlike the initial transactions in the confiscated block, which were conveyed by Whitaker and Russell, or Jackson and Russell. Kissling participated in 14 of the 19 conveyances of Katikati-Te Puna reserves that occurred up to December 1869. Details of Kissling’s professional life are limited to brief biographical details gleaned from directories or books about his father, the Anglican Archdeacon, George Adam Kissling.⁴⁰ Kissling bought one or two reserves and in the latter part of 1873, he advertised that he had ‘Money to lend’ on the front page of the Bay of Plenty Times. No other evidence of business connections with the district have been discovered by this author.⁴¹

The size, location, quality, and relative proximity to other reserves may have made some reserves more appealing than others to potential buyers. The tendency in the confiscated block, was to buy the larger reserves with the least number of owners

³⁹ Deed register K1 193, ref. 372^K; deed register K1 194, ref. 373^K, LINZ, Auckland.

⁴⁰ Trevor G. Kissling, The Venerable George Adam Kissling: A Memoir and a Family Tree of Descendents in New Zealand 1842-1972, Auckland 1972; Auckland Waikato Historical Journal, no. 68, pp. 31-33.

⁴¹ Bay of Plenty Times, 27 August 1873 to 6 December 1873.